Tag Archives: research

My colleagues Chris Clott, Rob Cannizzaro and I just published a paper in the Journal of Shipping and Trade. In it we propose a new standard called ServiceTerms for classifying container cargo on six ACTION dimensions which are relevant to downstream supply chain service and performance (and to some extent upstream actions). The six dimensions are

Accessorial

Customer Service

Transport

Inventory

Orders and paperwork

None of the above.

ServiceTerms would function something like INCOTERMS in supply chain contracts. They would provide a standard which every participant in the supply chain– ocean, rail and truck carriers, port terminals, warehousing, drayage, distribution, and so on– would know about in advance and determine how they were going to handle the goods to meet the standard. The standard includes a specification of limits on the time spent in each step of the journey, based on the total length in time committed to. These time standards would allow each of the actors to plan their operations to meet their time requirement. Aiming for the standard would coordinate the supply chain actors with only limited need for them to work together except on the handoffs. (And these are typically between just two adjacent players in the network.) The actors in the chain would be enabled to innovate their own individual techniques to meet their goals.

Like INCOTERMS there would be no specific penalties for failure. However, there would be measurement and reporting of performance (time in service) at each stage of the end-to-end delivery. Individual contracts could provide penalties, negotiated by the participants; everyone involved could keep track of whether a participant was doing his or her bit to meet the standard; or whether some were agreeing to a standard with less than total commitment to making it happen for individual cargoes.

Alliances have been touted as supply chain improvements because they coordinate a few ocean carriers on legs of a journey. But supply chain thinking tells us what matters is the overall source to destination performance, and that requires more involvement, particularly from downstream players such as rail, barge, truck, warehouse, and “last mile”. To improve their abysmal service performance, alliances have to find ways of coordinating the entire delivery process. A standard for the process that shippers, handlers, and carriers can agree and coordinate on is a central element.

We see alliances as entities capable of incubating the ServiceTerms standards, much as the International Chamber of Commerce does for INCOTERMS. ServiceTerms could then be included in a standard contract for delivery. The specifics of the ServiceTerms standard should be negotiated during the incubation process; and the process should allow for individual variations by contract, much as INCOTERMS do.

If the majority of cargo went according to the standard, all the supply chain players would work together to make sure the overall term was met. That should improve everyone’s focus on the goal of making customer service a standard rather than an exception in the container business.

My colleague and I and a student recently published a new paper in the American Journal of Transportation and Logistics. You can see it below. The paper is based on a presentation made at the International Association of Maritime Economists’ 2017 annual meeting in Japan.

The paper is about Ocean Trading Intermediaries (OTI’s) and their distribution across the US. The data came from the Federal Maritime Commission’s lists of registered US and foreign OTIs, which includes Ocean Freight Forwarders and Non Vessel Owning Ocean Carriers. WE discuss the history, legal framework, and current conditions facing OTIs and make special reference to the Chicago area, in which a cluster of these businesses has arisen.

We used statistical cluster analysis to show that despite the belief that ocean freight forwarding is becoming more technology driven and thus able to locate anywhere, the businesses still choose to form clusters in major ports.

How to cite this article:
Christopher Clott. Built to Last? The Changing Role of Ocean Transportation Intermediaries: Disintermediation and Reintermediation. American
Journal of Transportation and Logistics, 2018,1:5.

I recently published a new paper in the journal Games. You can see it below.

It deals with a very important logistics problem. In a cold chain, different parcels require different conditions of temperature. A multiple compartment vehicle can be sued to consolidate loads with different temperature characteristics in one vehicle. But loading the vehicle at a low cost is a hard problem, requiring heuristics to solve. And even then, how do we divide the cost of loading among the different package owners in a fair way? ‘Fair’ here means that no group of owners will choose to leave the consolidation, because they cannot do better on their own than the cost they are charged.

The paper uses an inductive algorithm on top of a common heuristic to give a method for solution. There is a small example in the paper that shows how to apply the algorithm.